Thursday, July 31, 2014

They both are part of SAP Social
Software. They both provide environments for enterprise collaboration between
workforce to drive cooperation while sharing data.

SuccessFactors
JAM
- Is social networking collaboration platform within enterprise from SAP.
Basically it is kind of “facebook” type of thing platform for enterprises. It
enables collaboration of employees between companies and their partner
companies while they all work on joint projects sharing applications, processes
etc. Features of the platform span from discussions, notifications, follow-ups,
creating (micro/blogging, wiki), and sharing content, organizing, tasking,
learning and all it is provided in “feed updates” like user interface. Main
goal is to engage workforce and boost their performance. The Jam platform
supports mobile devices in large extend. From its competitors point of view we
can say that JAM is like Microsoft’s Yammer. Jam got into SAP’s portfolio while
they acquire
SuccessFactors in 12/2011.

SAP
Streamwork – then there was Streamwork. It (was)/is solution homegrown
in SAP. We can say that it has broader scope then SuccessFactors JAM due to a
lot of integration to SAP’s backend systems like ERP, CRM, SRM, BW. And that’s one
of main powers of Streamwork – integration.

So guess what happened during
2012 while SAP was integration SuccessFactors as its daughter company. They integrated
both products into one as well. It is called SAP JAM as their platform for social software. The JAM’s
underlying platform seems was taken from SuccessFactors while a lot of features
from Streamwork were built into it.

Just updating few more
details how SAP started with SAP Streamwork. Initially it was called as collaboration
software previously known as 12sprints and/or Constellation. There was also Elements
application as next Enterprise 20 tool. All these finally merged into Streamwork.
Needless to say that all these initiatives were aiming as competition to Google‘s
Wawe. During its development the 12sprint (collaborative platform) was open to users
through a public beta. The 12sprint cloud-based service is designed to help
teams of internal and external users share information, collect feedback,
brainstorm or analyze across the group.

History knows it that Google
Wave was shouted down in August 2010. And SAP’s Streamwork was
ended on December 1, 2015 but replaced by SAP Jam.

Wednesday, July 30, 2014

Recently I worked on few
installations of SAP IDES systems. In this post I’d like to sum up important information
on the IDES systems.

In general the IDES is demo system of SAP software. IDES
means International (or Internet) Demonstration and Education System and basically
it models artificial company SAP Model Company or BestRun (e.g. company code
0005- 0005) who choose to implement SAP. The system has already a lot of customization
and data available right away after its installation. How the customizing/data
were basically prepared? The system is copy of SAP’s internal demo system. As
it is used for demo and training purposes also by SAP there are many preconfigured
clients with the data.

What about new version?
Can I upgrade my IDES? There are no specific patches (support packs - SP) for
IDES. However manual patching with SP form regular releases for particular
solution may be possible.

Savvy BW developer may
notice that there are two areas when it comes to global data declaration in
transformation’s routines. Start/end (and also Expert) routines are quite
heavily used within the transformation. The routines are generated as per templates.
While coding in ABAP we following areas reserved for us:

1st area for ABAP
code:

*$*$ begin of global - insert your declaration only below this line *-*... "insert your code here*$*$ end of global - insert your declaration only before this line *-*

2nd area ABAP code:

*$*$ begin of 2nd part global - insert your code only below this line *... "insert your code here*$*$ end of 2nd part global - insert your code only before this line *

While purpose of 3rd
area is clear – it serves for real code which encapsulated the business logic
of routines in case of other areas it is not that clear. The 3rd one
is actually where the routine begins. It is either end_routine, start_routine or
expert_routine METHOD begins. Why they are two areas for data declaration? If
we have a look into SAP documentation available here
or here
we can found out:

This would suggest that:
if data is declared in the 1st area then the data is available across all
datapackage. If the same is declared in the 2nd area then the data
is only available for the actual package. But this may not be really true.

Let’s see what else we can
say about first two. One of theories to solve this can be that 1st area is used
for data declaration according ABAP OO paradigm. 2nd one would be
used for data declaration of pre-OO (or non OO) ABAP standards. But this again
may not be true.

According SCN post in
forum available here there was
someone who got back to SAP with regards this mystery. If we can trust this
post here’s what SAP said:

In
the first global part you can write your declaration or code you want to be
able to reach globally in the transformation.

The
2nd global part will be used for those transformations which are migrated from
an update or transfer rule. Routines used there will be automatically generated
into the 2nd global part.

Sunday, July 13, 2014

Time
zone of SAP system is very important settings. When we compare particular times it only makes
sense when all compared times are in the same time zone. SAP system would
normally inherit time zone from operating system. However it can be customized
in TA STZAC. Particular value of
time zone customized in this TA is valid for all system’s clients.

Once
system time is customized all conversion to e.g. local time of user or conversion
to any other time zone are done by converting of system time to UTC and then to
desired time zone.

About Me

Working as a Business Intelligence consultant (at percept ltd.) in SAP area specializing on SAP NetWeaver (BW, BI). Certified as SAP NetWeaver Business Intelligence consultant. From Bratislava, Slovakia.
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